God believes your heart is strong enough.
At first, there had only been tiny pinpricks of light, shards of sun that dazzled as they fell on the leaves. But when they reached the vale of endless tents, the light had grown stronger. When Rodrigo glanced through the open flaps of tents, thinking he would see nothing but shadows, all he saw were glowing faces. Cherubic angels peering out at him, their rotund moon faces swollen with honey-sticky joy. And when he met the Emperor, the man who spoke with the voice of a black bird, he could no longer bear to raise his eyes toward the sky. Even though there was a heavy canvas tent over his head, he could still see the fiery explosions of God’s spinning eyes.
As he grabbed the cup, all the light went away. It was as if there was a vast hole in the bottom of the vessel, a sucking abyss that began to inhale deeply as he squeezed the metal stem in his hand. He could see the light streaming toward the cup. It flowed across the table like water running uphill; it dribbled out of Ferenc’s eyes in fat, squirming tears; it fell from the sparkling wheels in the sky in sheets of fiery rain. The cup continued to inhale, seemingly unperturbed by the quantity of light it was consuming, until there was nothing left but shadows.
In the resonant darkness, the black bird kept shrieking, and Rodrigo heard answering calls, the echoes of all the crows and vultures from the battlefield. Each voice splintered into tinier voices, like the cries of lost children—the orphans of Mohi, of Legnica, of every city the Mongol horde had destroyed in its relentless quest to trample the world.
Make them stop! he pleaded with the darkness. Give them peace. Embrace them. But if God was in the darkness, he did not respond to Rodrigo’s prayer. The priest teetered on the edge of the abyss, the one that had nearly consumed him once before, buffeted by the screams and cries of all the dead birds.
His feet slipped, but he did not plummet into the empty vastness. He hung, dangling over the abyss, one hand wrapped tightly around the stem of the cup, and it did not move. Grunting and straining, he reached up and put both hands on it.
He remembered everything perfectly: his catechisms from the seminary, the holy words of God writ in the Bible, the insights gleaned from Brother Albertus, the last benediction from the Archbishop before the armies of the West were devastated on the plain near Mohi, the words spoken to him by the fair-haired angel at the farm. Signa hodie lumen vultus tui super me... It was only through arduous reflection upon everything he could recall that he could understand God. That he could understand his place in God’s design.
There was still a glimmer of light in the cup. Every muscle in his body groaned as he raised himself so that he could sip from the floating cup. He put his lips against the warm metal, and as his flesh made contact with the Grail, it tipped toward him. A golden streak of light flowed into his open mouth, and he drank it eagerly, accepting it into his body, into his soul.
When he exploded, he knew he was the exultation of light that he had seen in his vision. The endless wheels within wheels were his existence, shattered and strewn throughout the profusion of possibilities, destinies, histories, implications, and connections. He whirled, each particle of his being shivering with an ecstatic thrill. He saw everything and heard nothing.
As the wheels began to slow, as his being began to coalesce once more, he started to weep.
He could see cracks in the vessel, and even with all this light and warmth, the cracks could not be healed...
Father Rodrigo struggled in Ferenc’s grip. “What are you doing, boy?” the priest screamed. His eyes were wild and his face was pale with blotches of red—the same sort of coloration that Ferenc had seen during more than one of the priest’s feverish fits. “She wants to steal the Grail. She’s a child of Satan.”
He didn’t believe what Father Rodrigo was saying—he couldn’t—and he felt more strongly the fear he had been trying to push away. He had seen the priest become lost in his fever fogs before, but never like this. Never with such little warning.
Without taking his eyes off Father Rodrigo, Ferenc listened to the sounds of movement behind him: Ocyrhoe’s ragged breathing; her hands and knees moving across the rough ground; the sound of cloth scraping against the same. Father Rodrigo thrust out an arm, pointing over Ferenc’s shoulder, and he heard Ocyrhoe’s horse spook with a deep snort.
“Stop her!” Father Rodrigo shrieked.